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 Next athletic director to help UNC realize ‘great potential’
King selected as journalism school dean
Gray recommended as VC for finance and administration
Meares’ charge: Match donors’ goals with Carolina’s needs
Human Resources launches wellness initiative with focus on
mind, body, balance, community
Next athletic director to help UNC realize ‘great potential’
A 13-member search committee has hired Gainesville,
Fla.-based Carr Sports Associates Inc. to help identify a new athletic director
to replace longtime AD Dick Baddour.
In July, Baddour announced plans to accelerate his
retirement so the new athletic director could hire Carolina’s next head
football coach.
In his charge to the search committee at its inaugural
meeting last month, Chancellor Holden Thorp told members they faced a daunting
task.
Both Baddour and his predecessor, John Swofford, each served
Carolina for many years, and each helped to build an athletics program that is
considered one of the most comprehensive and competitive in
the country.
“If there was a Hall of Fame for athletic directors, these
two guys would be in it,” Thorp said.
Trustee Lowry
Caudill, who also serves as an adjunct faculty member in the chemistry department,
chairs the search committee, which includes representatives of the Educational
Foundation Inc., trustees, University faculty and administrators, athletics
department staff members and successful former student-athletes.
“I feel very confident knowing all of you are here to help
us do this and I am especially
confident in Lowry Caudill, who I have worked with for such a long time,” Thorp
said.
“This is an important moment in the history of the
University. We are in a difficult time, but we are also in a time of great
potential. This process will help us realize that potential.”
The athletic director will oversee what is considered to be
one of the nation’s most successful college sports programs. Nearly 800
student-athletes compete in 28 men’s and women’s varsity sports.
“We need someone who completely understands the importance
of all 28 sports at Carolina,” Thorp added. “For the right candidate, this will
be an extremely attractive feature of the job.”
Faculty Chair Jan Boxill added a qualification: When the
next athletic director stands before the Faculty Council for the first time,
that person should be someone faculty members will be glad is there.
“It has to be a person we can trust,”
she said.
Search committee member Martina Ballen said it was important
to remember in the midst of current controversies that Carolina has a special
culture and tradition that took decades to build, and that the next athletic
director needs to recognize and preserve. Ballen is senior associate athletic
director and chief financial officer of the athletics
department .
There are some serious issues that need attention, but the
next athletic director needs to “understand we are not broken,” said Ballen, a
25-year veteran of the athletics department.
The committee met again last week and was scheduled to meet
today (Sept. 14), and hopes to recommend a new AD this fall.
King selected as journalism school dean
King |
Susan King, vice president for external affairs for Carnegie
Corporation of New York, will be recommended to become the next dean of the
School of Journalism and Mass Communication, pending approval by the Board of
Trustees.
Chancellor Holden Thorp and Executive Vice Chancellor and
Provost Bruce Carney selected King following a national search. If approved,
King’s appointment will be effective Jan. 1. She also would hold the title John
Thomas Kerr Distinguished Professor.
“As the digital age brings swift changes to the way we
communicate, the journalism school’s curriculum is continuously updated so that
our students will not only have the skills they need but also be able to lead
the news industry into the future,” Thorp said.
“Susan King’s impressive work as an architect of the
Carnegie-Knight Initiative on the Future of Journalism Education shows her
ability to prepare a new generation of communicators to seize the opportunities
of the fast-moving multimedia era.”
Carolina is one of a dozen universities participating in the
Carnegie-Knight Initiative’s News21 experimental reporting program launched by
King. UNC won more than 40 national and international awards for its News21
contribution, Powering a Nation (see story on page 1).
Prior to Carnegie, King worked nearly five years in the
U.S. Department of Labor as the assistant secretary for public affairs and as
the executive director of the Family and Medical Leave Commission.
Her journalism career included stints with ABC, CBS and NBC
News. At CBS, she was a correspondent for Walter Cronkite. King was also an
independent journalist reporting for CNN and ABC Radio News. She was a local
television news anchor at stations in Buffalo, N.Y., and Washington, D.C. She
has hosted the “Diane Rehm Show” and “Talk of the Nation” for National Public
Radio.
King has a bachelor’s degree in English from Marymount
College in Tarrytown, N.Y., and she earned her master’s degree in
communications from Fairfield University in Fairfield, Conn.
King will replace media historian Jean Folkerts, who stepped
down June 30 after five years as dean to join the faculty to teach courses,
conduct research and mentor students. Dulcie Straughan, former senior associate
dean of the journalism school, has served as the interim dean since July 1.
Jim Dean, dean of the Kenan-Flagler Business School, chaired
the campus advisory committee that led the search for the new dean. Carney
thanked Straughan and Dean for their efforts.
Gray recommended as VC for finance and administration
Gray |
Chancellor Holden Thorp has recommended Karol Kain Gray,
vice president for finance and administration at Stony Brook University in
Stony Brook, N.Y., to become Carolina’s new vice chancellor for finance
and administration.
If the appointment is approved by the Board of Trustees in
September, it will become effective Dec. 1.
Gray would succeed Richard Mann, who announced his
retirement this year but agreed to stay on until his replacement was named.
Gray also succeeded Mann when he left Stony Brook to come to Carolina in 2006.
“Karol Gray has distinguished herself as an exceptionally
qualified administrator and chief financial officer at Stony Brook University,”
Thorp said. “She brings more than three decades of experience at a
distinguished public university to Carolina at a time when we face major budget
challenges and changes to how we run the campus. We’re very fortunate to have
attracted a candidate of her stature to join our
administrative team.”
As vice chancellor for finance and administration, Gray
would serve as the University’s principal finance and business officer and
report to
the chancellor.
She has 33 years of experience at Stony Brook, where she is
responsible for developing and implementing administrative policies in addition
to enhancing fiscal services.
Before taking Stony Brook’s top finance position, Gray
worked her way up steadily at the university as a financial analyst, chief
accountant, controller and associate vice president for finance and
administration. She has also served as a liaison to the governance and finance
committees of the Stony Brook University Hospital.
Gray graduated with a bachelor’s degree in business
administration from Hofstra University. Her candidacy resulted from a national
search led by a committee chaired by Bill McCoy, former vice chair of BellSouth
Corp., vice president for finance for General Administration and former interim
chancellor at Carolina.
“We’re grateful to the search committee members and Bill
McCoy for all of their work in making this search successful,” Thorp said.
Meares’ charge: Match donors’ goals with Carolina’s needs
Mark Meares majored in English – with an emphasis on
creative writing – when he was an undergraduate at Carolina in the 1970s.
He eventually returned to Carolina in 1998 to join the
University Advancement staff as associate director of Corporate and Foundation
Relations and assumed his current position as director three years later.
Although he did not know it at the time, he said, in many
ways the job would require him to become a student again. But this time around,
he added, there was only one subject to study: “Carolina.”
After 13 years of University service, his mastery of that
subject earned Meares a 2011 C. Knox Massey Distinguished Service Award.
In particular, Meares was cited for his work orchestrating
the Innovate@Carolina Campaign, a $125 million drive aimed at making Carolina a
world leader in launching university-born ideas for the good of society.
Nominated by two deans and three associate provosts and
deans, Meares was praised for his tireless work ethic and an esprit de corps
second to none.
Meares said he considers himself lucky to have a job that
requires that he learn so much about the University and the great work happening
here. It is the value of that work, he added, that adds meaning to his own
work.
“It is really important for me to say that it is the content
of this University – the quality of the people we have here and the work
they do – that makes what I do possible,” Meares said. “It is not me. I
just have to be out there, keeping my eyes open.”
Going the extra mile
It could be said that Meares has always been a keen observer
of his surroundings.
He hails from Maryville, Tenn., in the foothills of the
Great Smoky Mountains. It was a place where men of faith took up snake handling
to demonstrate their faith in God’s word.
His first year at Carolina, Meares wrote about the snake
handlers for an English course.
To research the subject, he drove up winding dirt roads to
Newport, Tenn., where he hoped to witness a Sunday night service delivered by
Rev. Liston L. Pack, a noted snake handler. Meares found out about Pack when
Time magazine wrote about Pack’s brother dying after he drank strychnine.
“Rev. Pack was quoted in Time that his brother must have
died because he was a non-believer down deep,” Meares said.
During the service, Meares sensed he had caught Pack’s
attention.
“Everybody was getting excited and throwing their arms up
and waving and Liston Pack started saying, ‘I believe tonight there are some
non-believers in church with us and I am very, very fearful that something
terrible is going to happen to them.’ After I heard that, I threw my arms up
and started waving, too.”
A desire to give back
Meares draws upon the writing and communication skills he
learned at Carolina to do his work, but the range of sales experience he gained
working for Village Companies in Chapel Hill has proven to be invaluable as
well.
He worked for the company for more than 14 years, serving as
general manager of Village Printing, publisher of The Leader Magazine, and
general manager and executive vice president of The Village Advocate, Village
Printing and the Triangle Pointer
magazine.
In 1995, he joined the Hudson Belk department store chain as
marketing director and was promoted to vice president a year later. Over time
he became increasingly involved in public service and began serving on the
boards of the Chapel Hill-Carrboro YMCA and the Chapel Hill-Carrboro Public
School Foundation.
It was also during this period that he began thinking about
what he could do to give back to Carolina. To find out, he scheduled coffee to
discuss volunteering with Margie Crowell, a friend who then was associate vice
chancellor of university development.
“She told me, ‘We have some jobs open. Maybe one of them
would be right for you,’” he said.
Making connections
Until that point, selling is what Meares had always done and
was what he knew. At Carolina, his
objective was not selling the University, but advancing it. He did that by
raising money to pay for things that could make it better.
One constant in both professions is the importance of
knowing your customers’ needs, Meares said.
His job is to match the foundation to the University
department or faculty member whose work touches on those areas the foundation
and the University are interested in advancing, he said.
The Ford Foundation, for instance, is interested in racial
equality, Meares said.
“OK, what do we have going on at Carolina that it might be
interested in? Well, we have the Civil Rights Center founded by Julius
Chambers, one of the greatest civil rights lawyers in the history of this
country,” he said.
“It is easy to see that there may be some things they can
mutually help each other accomplish. Our job over here is to try to bring those
two groups together and get them talking. Our goal is fundraising, but the way
we do that is to manage and nurture these relationships in a way that allows
them to find a good fit.”
Stephen Farmer, who heads undergraduate admissions, cited
the central role Meares played in developing a proposal to the Jack Kent Cook
Foundation that would create the Carolina Student Transfer Excellence Program.
The first of its kind in the state, the program has enabled
low- to moderate-income students in community colleges to transfer to Carolina.
“Mark has been a tireless and extremely effective advocate
of the University’s mission to serve the people of North Carolina, the nation
and the world,” Farmer said.
But Meares said it is a privilege to have a job that
requires him to learn something new about a place he will always cherish.
“What I love
most about this job is that it requires of me that I am out there talking to
faculty members to find out what they have been discovering,” Meares said.
“I am lucky enough to get all of this intellectual
stimulation while trying to make those connections.”
Human Resources launches
wellness initiative
with focus on
mind, body, balance, community |
|
This fall, employees can learn about wellness in a new way
through the launch of Work Well, Live Well, the University’s new employee
wellness program. A four-week celebration will begin Sept. 27, with each week
focused on one of the four Work Well, Live Well components – mind, body,
balance and community.
“To reinvigorate the campus commitment to health and
well-being, the UNC wellness program has been given a totally new look,” said
Ashley Nicklis, senior director for benefits and work/life programs in the
Office of Human Resources. “Work Well, Live Well is designed to focus on the
whole person to be as inclusive as possible.”
The four-week celebration will offer employees a variety of
ways to explore the program’s four components. Challenges for each week will
incorporate activities designed to promote physical activity, healthy living
and improved well-being. Three basic challenges will be posted each week,
motivating employees to greater overall wellness, regardless of fitness level.
“In addition, each week will feature an all-star challenge,
which requires a bit more effort and a commitment of time and energy to
achieve,” Nicklis added.
Those who accomplish at least five basic challenges each
week can present their challenge record at Employee Appreciation Day on Oct. 21
to be eligible for hourly wellness prizes. Employees who accomplish all four
all-star challenges by the end of the celebration will be entered into a
separate drawing for one of two grand prizes – a one-year membership to
Campus Recreation or a new custom-built bicycle.
The challenge lists, as well as a challenge record to track
participation, are available on the Work Well, Live Well website,
go.unc.edu/Ye37J, along with a comprehensive list of resources relating to
health, fitness, finances and community involvement. In addition, the Work
Well, Live Well website is available as a resource for any University
departments wishing to develop wellness initiatives or projects of their own.
Look for further components to be added as the semester
progresses, including a wellness calendar to keep employees informed of campus
activities and wellness opportunities.
To get tips, news and updates about wellness, visit the
website to sign up for the Work Well, Live Well listserv. For more information,
email benefits@unc.edu. |
